Multi-parametric system for the continuous assessment and monitoring of motor status in Parkinson's disease: An entropy-based gait comparison

Abstract

A "Multi-parametric system for the continuous assessment and monitoring of motor status in Parkinson's disease" (PERFORM), is an FP7 project from the European Commission that aims at providing an innovative and reliable tool, able to evaluate, monitor and manage patients suffering from motor neurodegenerative diseases. The current work is related to a module of the project that is in charge of assessing PD patients during locomotion. These initial analyses of gait are based on analyses of Sample Entropy in the acceleration signals. Four PD patients are compared to four healthy using a set of five wireless sensors located in the limbs and in the trunk. A metric to assess the level of symmetry during locomotion, an important clinical feature, is proposed. Results show considerable differences between the patients and the subjects, both for sample entropy (in 3 of the 5 sensors) and in the gait asymmetry index (left vs. right limbs). Future work is proposed including age-matched subjects and a larger sample.

Mobile Systems as a Challenge for Neurological Diseases Management – The Case of Parkinson's Disease

“…This submodule processes received patient signals and detects the targeted patient symptoms (tremor, levodopa induced dyskinesia and off state). For each symptom dedicated submodule processes the relevant signals, detests the symptom episode and quantifies it into a severity scale from 1 to 4, according to the UPDRS scaling for PD patients (Cancela et al, 2010;Pansera et al, 2009). Other features such as duration, frequently and amplitude might also be provided for further clinician review and system evaluation.…”

A holistic approach to assess the feasability of telehealth for Parkinson's disease management

“…A step forward requires the exploration of performing the assessment of PD patient on unsupervised environments. Part of the work presented in this chapter, including figures and tables, have been already published in Cancela et al [482] as well as in the proceedings of several international conferences [1], [3], [5], [8]- [10], [12], [14]- [16], [531].…”

“…Entropy is the measure of the uncertainty or unpredictability associated to a specific variable, or in other words, it is a measure of the disorder. Former works [5], [6], [8] have shown how to use the technique "Sample Entropy" to calculate the variability and complexity of gait in PD disease. Sample entropy quantifies the regularity of a time series.…”

“…Let ) (r n m i be the number of vectors that match at tolerance level "r", then ( 8 ) represents the probability represents the probability that any two vector ) (i x m and ) ( j x m match between them and the average value is calculated as ( 9 ).…”

“…Results show considerable differences between the patients and the subjects, both for sample entropy (in 3 of the 5 sensors) and in the gait asymmetry index (left vs. right limbs). Future work is proposed including age-matched subjects and a larger sample [8]. Rigas et al (2009) built a system able to perform a real-time quantification of resting tremor in the PD.…”